Game Over - By James Patterson Page 0,21

see him, he was wearing the latter. And he was drawing back a very thick rubber band to which he’d fastened a metal paper clip.

Thwak!

Professor Kuniyoshi stopped talking and turned around at the noise but—not noticing the paper-clipped rubber band on the floor behind Kildare, or the tear trickling out of Kildare’s eye, or Ichi’s friends’ barely suppressed laughter—turned back to the board and continued to draw the common elements of moth wings.

Kildare looked like he was just going to suck up the pain. I, however, had reached my breaking point. I was going to teach this bully a lesson about entomology.

I turned my attention to the hundreds of butterflies and moths on their display mounts on the table in front of Professor Kuniyoshi. Then with my mind I popped the pins from their wings and brought them back from the dead.

First one, then another, then every single specimen in the collection twitched, quivered, fluttered, and flew up into the air.

The entire class sat up and watched, openmouthed, as the butterflies gathered in an enormous colorful cloud in the middle of the room.

And then, en masse, they streaked to the back of the class and began to dive-bomb Ichi’s spiky-haired head.

“Ah-ah-ah-ah!” screamed Ichi in a voice so piercing and panicked he sounded more like a seven-year-old girl than a fourteen-year-old thug. “Get them off!!”

He leaped from his chair, swatting wildly about his head.

This time when poor Professor Kuniyoshi turned around, he didn’t fail to notice what was happening. But he didn’t quite know what to do about it.

“My collection?” He gasped. “My butterflies? Ichi, what are you doing to my butterflies?! Don’t you dare harm my specimens, young man!”

“Get them off me!” shrieked Ichi, running laps around the room now. They weren’t really hurting him, of course, but Ichi was apparently scared enough to fear the worst.

The rest of the class, including Ichi’s so-called friends, were roaring with laughter. Everybody, that is, except for Kildare, who had turned around in his seat and was staring right at me.

Chapter 27

SCHOOL IS EXHAUSTING. I don’t know how human kids do it. By the time I got back to the suite, I could barely stand up. I wasn’t even going to change out of my dorky sailor-boy seifuku. I was just going to let myself in, unsling my book bag, and sleep on the nearest soft object I could find—a couch, a bed, an area rug, a pile of clothes…

But no sooner had I opened the door and stepped inside than—WHAM!—I was facedown on the bamboo floor with my arm twisted behind my back and the whining sound of a fully charged Opus 24/24 in my ear.

My powerful assailant’s weight shifted, driving a knee into the small of my back.

“You could be dead right now, Daniel,” whispered a voice I knew all too well, a voice I should have known to expect at just a moment such as this.

“Dad, I’ve had a rough day. Can you please let me up?”

“You expect to take on Number 7, Number 8, and Number 1, and you walk blindly into your hotel room without running a security sweep? Have you forgotten everything you’ve been taught?”

“Dad,” I pleaded, “my arm, my—”

Dad let go of my wrist and got up, but he didn’t power down the Opus 24/24.

Opus 24/24s have only one setting—eternal damnation. They contain an illegal molecular resonator that fires a gigawatt pulse that vibrates at the precise frequency of its victim’s neurotransmissions. In the simplest terms, it causes its victims to expire from pure pain. Which is kind of why they’re banned across most of the civilized universe.

Seeing one in my father’s hands was a little jarring to say the least. It was the very same weapon The Prayer had used to kill him and my mother.

“Dad, put that thing down already, okay?”

“Make me,” he commanded in a voice that sent chills down my spine. He was challenging me as part of our ongoing training exercises, but I don’t think he realized how truly exhausted I was.

Just as I was about to tell him he was seconds away from being dematerialized—stored in the lower levels of my consciousness until I needed him again—he grabbed me with one hand and flung me across the room into a Noguchi glass coffee table, which promptly shattered.

“Ouch. What the heck?!”

I struggled to my feet, anger boiling inside me. It was one thing to keep me on my toes, but it was another to take advantage of a tired kid who’d